WRIGHT, RICHARD

Born near Roxie, Mississippi, in 1908, Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908–November 28, 1960) became one of America's foremost chroniclers of African-American life under segregation. The son of a sharecropper and a schoolteacher, Wright spent a grim childhood in Mississippi. He detailed his attempts to retain individual dignity in the face of poverty and racism in the autobiographical Black Boy (1945). Valedictorian of his ninth-grade class, Wright received little further formal education. A voracious reader, he was influenced by contemporary literary naturalists and modernists, such as Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and James T. Farrell, as well as the critic H. L. Mencken.

In 1927 Wright joined the great migration of black southerners to Chicago, where he worked as a delivery boy, dishwasher, and a post office clerk, a job he lost after the economy soured in 1930. Wright began to produce poetry and fiction, the bulk of which details the corrosive effects of southern racism. Conditions in Chicago acquainted Wright with the northern face of Jim Crow. While black Chicagoans did not face the threats of physical violence so common in the Deep South, they were segregated on Chicago's South Side, where they paid high rents for bleak ghetto housing. Wright attended meetings of the John Reed Club, read Marxist theory, and joined the Communist Party in 1932. He published poetry and short fiction in progressive magazines such as Left Front, Anvil, and New Masses. In 1935 Wright was hired by the WPA's Federal Writers' Project to help research the Illinois volume in the American Guide series. He also worked for the Negro Federal Theatre of Chicago, a division of the Federal Theatre Project. In 1937 he moved to New York, where he became editor of the Harlem-based Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper. Wright's work in the 1930s and 1940s revealed to white Americans the frustration that black Americans felt toward poverty and racism. One of his best-known essays, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," was published in American Stuff: WPA Writers' Anthology (1937).

In 1940 Wright published his first novel, Native Son, which gained critical and popular success. Set in Chicago, the novel traces the life of Bigger Thomas from his encounters with racism, both paternalistic and violent, through his flirtation with radical politics, to his accidental murder of his white employer's daughter. Wright's fiction was influenced by Marxian materialism and the work of contemporary sociologists. Wright portrayed a society riven by class tensions exacerbated by racism. Wright's characters, like most Americans of the Depression years, seem buffeted by economic, social, and political forces beyond their control.

During World War II, Wright broke with the Communist Party, but he continued to be critical of American racism. In 1947, Wright became an expatriate in France, where he was joined by other major black writers, including James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Wright's later works did not enjoy the critical or financial success he had met in the 1930s and 1940s, although his reputation as one of America's major twentieth-century writers is secure. He died in France in 1960.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baldwin, James. "Everybody's Protest Novel." In Notes of a Native Son. 1955.

Barnes, Deborah. "'I'd Rather Be a Lamppost in Chicago': Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance of African American Literature." The Langston Hughes Review 14 (1996): 52–61.

Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, rev. edition, translated by Isabel Barzun. 1993.

Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. 1980.

Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. 2001.